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Postings from July 2002
At 2:13 PM -0700 7/10/02, John Porter wrote:
>Dan Sugalski wrote:
>> John Porter wrote:
>> > but what about non-PMC variables?
>>
>> Generally speaking, there aren't any. Everything else (in this case
>> the buffer/string things) is for internal use only. Languages aren't
>> supposed to expose strings directly.
>
>Languages are only supposed to expose PMCs?
Yep.
>Not ints, nums, strs?
Nope. Well, mostly nope.
>Why have them if Perl can't see them?
The int and num registers are in there primarily for the compiler's
use. Ints are useful for counters and offsets in lists as well as for
the regex engine, while nums are useful for FP math. Strings are
handy for the regex engine. All three are useful as temporaries in
some situations, as well as for the code used to implement PMC
functions. (It is, for example, perfectly acceptable to hand-code PMC
functions in assembler, and for that you'd use the registers)
Aggregate PMCs *don't* have to be made up of PMCs themselves, though
PMCs do have to be constructed as need be. So if you did "my str
@foo;", @foo would be represented by a PMC, but each entry in it
would be represented by a string structure.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
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